by Cath Crowley
Every night this week I’ve gone home thinking about A and B, and the pink on the pages of Pablo Neruda. I think about F and what happened to him when E died. Those thoughts lead to Henry, which are thoughts that keep me awake. It’s as though I’ve slipped back through time. I’ve fallen back into thinking about Henry as I drive to work, as I drive home. Things happen and it’s him I want to tell.
I’ve fallen back into thinking about him at night. The only way I’ve been able to sleep in the end is by distracting myself with Cloud Atlas. Whenever I’ve thought about kissing Henry, I’ve read a page. It’s 544 pages long. I’ve almost finished the book.
On Friday, I’m looking at the note where Henry has asked me to dance. ‘I want to say yes, but I’ve been here before,’ I say to Lola, who’s lying on the floor while I catalogue this afternoon, lost in her own thoughts about Hiroko leaving. She sits up and goes to take the letter, but Henry’s in the store watching, so I shake my head.
‘You don’t want to talk about it?’ she asks.
‘I want to talk about it, but pretend we’re talking about something else.’
‘This is the problem,’ she says.
‘With us?’
‘With everything. No one’s saying what they want.’
‘I don’t know what I want.’
‘You must know what you want or you wouldn’t want to talk about it while you pretended we’re talking about something else.’
‘Amy’ll come back,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘She’ll definitely come back,’ Lola says, and flicks her eyes at the letter. ‘But maybe Henry does something different this time.’
I drive Martin home and lift the talking ban because I like Martin but also because he and Henry have become friends, and I’m wondering if they talk about Amy or me. I can’t ask him directly, but I’m hoping he’ll spill something by accident.
We discuss the cataloguing at first. Martin’s finding things in books too, but not like I am. He’s finding things people leave by mistake, the accidental histories of people.
Mostly, we talk about George on the way home this afternoon. He fills me in on what happened after the party, how they made up and then he blew it by telling her she had a problem. He’s been buying her coffee all week as an apology, and today he made progress. He does this double punch in the air that reminds me of Cal. ‘She smiled at me today when I handed over the coffee, so I asked her if maybe she wanted to meet up tonight and she said yes. We’re going out later. Just as friends, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I say.
He looks so excited that I feel like I should say something to him. If it were Cal sitting next to me, about to go out ‘as friends’ with a girl he really liked, I’d tell him to be careful. I don’t tell Martin that, though. It’s not like I’m being careful about my feelings for Henry.
I’m smiling when I walk into the restaurant, an Italian place not far from the warehouse. I’m looking forward to seeing Rose. She’s been working all week, and we’ve hardly had a chance to talk. I’m looking forward to seeing Henry. I liked helping Martin. I’m thinking about garlic bread and smiling even more when I see Mum sitting at the table with Rose.
‘Surprise! I missed you so much that I took the day off school,’ she says, in a voice that sounds falsely cheerful.
When I kiss her on the cheek, she tells me I smell nice. I feel guilty for finding the energy to use make-up and Rose’s perfume this morning.
‘You look happy,’ Mum says.
‘I had a good day,’ I tell her, and she smiles and says she’s glad. It feels as though she’s not glad, though, but I wonder if I’m imagining it. I reach for the bread and offer it around and Rose fills in the quiet that comes after by saying she’s heard great things about this restaurant.
‘Excuse me,’ Mum says quietly before she goes outside to have a cigarette.
‘She’s mad at me,’ I say to Rose, and she looks genuinely surprised.
‘Why would she be mad? You’re all she’s talked about since she arrived. But she made the mistake of meeting me at the ER.’
I look at her through the window and wonder if I will ever just go forwards, past all this, to being happy. I wonder if we go back again and again all our lives. Everything about her is different since Cal died. She was lean and strong before, muscles carved by the water.
‘Does it bother you?’ I ask Rose. ‘Don’t you think about Cal all day long, with the machines beeping and the people dying?’
‘I don’t think about Cal there, no.’
‘So you get used to it?’ I say. ‘Used to death?’
She pours a glass of wine. ‘I guess it’s that no two deaths are the same. It’d be terrible if they were.’
Rose changes the subject by quizzing me about the bookstore. I focus on her questions so I don’t stare at Mum after she comes back to the table. I tell them about the Letter Library and how Michael wants me to catalogue it before they sell.
‘It’ll go quick,’ Mum says, and Rose agrees the building is fantastic, and Mum shakes her head and says, ‘They won’t keep the building. They’ll knock it down to build flats. All around here flats are going up. Behind you at the warehouse, there’s another lot.’
It’s not Mum’s fault that the plan might be to demolish the shop. She’s right about the flats. But now I can’t stop thinking about the bookstore knocked down and gone. I’m almost certain the idea hasn’t occurred to Henry. He talks about the bookstore as though it’s passing into someone else’s hands, into the care of someone else who loves books.
‘Have you told people, about Cal?’ Mum asks.
‘I told Henry. I’m not planning on telling anyone else, though, just in case either of you run into Sophia.’
I’m expecting Rose to argue with me, to tell me it’s time. But she says she can’t say the words either. ‘Stupid, but I’ve only told my boss at St. Albert’s. I don’t want to think about it at work.’
The food arrives and Mum says Gran wants to know if I’ve gone through the box of Cal’s things that she gave to me before I left.
‘It’s still in the car,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll get to it, though.’
I think back to that family in the waiting room. I describe them to Rose, and she remembers. ‘It was the girl’s father,’ she says. ‘He’d been in a car accident.’
‘And?’ I ask.
‘And he was okay,’ Rose says, and Mum breathes out in relief.
It makes me feel better that Mum cares about that unknown family. Somehow it means that even though Cal’s death has changed both of us, it hasn’t changed us at our core. Mum and I were both there at the moment that Cal died, and sometimes I worry that seeing that has altered something so fundamental about us. I worry we lost some of our humanness that day, and it’s not coming back.
Henry
now she’s back, I feel more like me
Martin and I meet outside Shanghai Dumplings. He asks where George is, and I have to break it to him that she’s not coming. ‘It’s just you and me as it turns out.’
‘I thought it was a family tradition.’
‘I did too,’ I say, and try not to sound unhappy about it. I like Martin, but he’s not a substitute for my whole family.
While we wait for Mai Li to seat us, I think about the conversation Dad and I had earlier. Rachel and Martin had left, and George wasn’t around. He told me dinner was off tonight. ‘Your mum and I just don’t feel like it,’ he said. ‘George has gone to her place for dinner. I’m eating with Frederick and Frieda.’
He took some money from the petty cash so I could pay for Martin’s dinner, and gave it to me with a book he’d bought during the week.
The book is a Penguin Classics edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories. There are yellow butterflies on the cover, squarish wings fitting together to make a hexagon shape. Some butterflies are breaking off from the whole. ‘Read “Shakespeare’s Memory”,’ Dad suggested, and I promised that I would.
> Dad introduced me to Borges’ short stories one night in Year 10 when I was looking for something to read. I’d finished Kelly Link’s The Wrong Grave and I loved the strangeness of the stories. I’d moved on to Karen Russell and loved those stories too, when Dad found me roaming around the bookshop in search of something else.
He’d put a copy of Borges’ stories into my hands and recommended ‘The Library of Babel’. I read it with the dictionary beside me. I only sort of half understood the thing. It was full of mathematical and scientific references that I wanted to talk about with Rachel, but she’d left by then. I decided it was about people needing the answers to the world, to the universe, and going mad trying to find them.
Mai Li comes over and I explain it’s just the two of us, so she seats us on a tiny table near the toilet. People keep hitting the back of my chair with the door. There’s no room for my elbows on the table. There’s barely room for the menu, which I look at for the first time in my whole life because I have to decide what to order for one.
It doesn’t seem right to talk about books without the family here, but it doesn’t seem right not to, so I tell Martin about the Borges that Dad gave me earlier. I hand it over so he can look at it. I try to explain ‘The Library of Babel’ but I can’t quite put it into words. ‘It’s about a universe in the shape of a library, full of all possible works, even ones that don’t make sense. Rachel would have been able to explain it better.’
‘You’ve known her a long time,’ he says.
‘Ten years, if you count the three when she was away.’ I do count them. ‘She’s the closest friend I have.’ I’m not sure if the word ‘friends’ really covers us. I don’t know what word does, exactly. We’re us. Now that she’s back, I feel more like me.
‘Did you? I mean, have you ever?’
‘With Rachel? No. Definitely not. People ask. I mean, people ask all the time. But Rachel would never. I’d never. It’s always been Amy.’
‘How are things with her?’ he asks.
‘I haven’t heard anything since the text,’ I tell him.
I actually haven’t thought much about her this week, I realise. I’ve been thinking too much about Cal. About how he followed me around all the time when he was a kid, asking me questions, and then, when he was about 12, he turned into this super brain and the dynamic shifted. I miss him, and because he’s been away for so long, it feels a bit like a piece of the world has broken away.
‘Do you know anyone who’s died?’ I ask.
‘My grandmother,’ Martin says. ‘We were close. I miss her.’
We stop talking to order, and then I lean in and ask the question that’s been bugging me since Rachel told me the news. ‘Where do they go? I mean, they’re here and then they’re not. I can’t get my head around it.’
‘Did someone you know die?’ he asks, and I want to talk about it with him. I want to get some explanations from someone who’s as logical as Martin. But I promised Rachel, so I can’t.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I say, and ask him how things are going with George.
‘Things are better,’ he says, and I’m surprised. They don’t seem better. ‘Around this time last week she was telling you to fuck off.’
‘And I told her that I had decided not to fuck off.’
It’s an interesting tactic. ‘What did she say?’
‘She told me that if I didn’t fuck off, she would.’
‘I’m confused about how things are better.’
‘I was nice to her all week and this afternoon we had a breakthrough. I think we might be friends again.’
Before I can ask what that breakthrough was, exactly, Mai Li gets a break and takes it with us, and the subject shifts to her latest poetry performance and the university course that’s starting and whether or not fried wontons are better than steamed.
It’s easy hanging out with Martin, so when we leave the restaurant and he points to a poster advertising Pavement, a club not far from here, I agree to go with him for a little while. There’s time before I have to be at Laundry, plus Pavement isn’t the kind of place a guy like Martin should go to alone.
It’s walking distance from Shanghai Dumplings. It takes us about ten minutes. When we arrive there’s a line out the front filled with a lot of very angry-looking people. I saw Pavement once listed on the top of ‘The Most Violent Places in Gracetown’ in the local paper.
The line moves. It’s free to get in because no one would pay and we stick to the carpet as we walk through the club, all the way over to the far side of the room. There’s a live band that threaten to eat kittens on stage and everyone claps at the suggestion. ‘Put your back against the wall,’ I tell Martin, who’s looking around like he’s expecting to see a friend. He watches two guys walk past us; one of them is leading the other one by a chain. ‘It’s really best not to stare, Martin,’ I say.
He leans over and yells, ‘When will George be here?’
‘What?’ I yell back.
‘George. When will George be here?’
‘George wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this,’ I yell. ‘She was at Mum’s tonight but she’s probably back at the bookshop by now playing Scrabble and drinking warm cocoa.’
Martin nods and says, ‘Riggght,’ like something’s just become clear to him.
Something’s just become clear to me, too. ‘George told you she’d be here? That was the breakthrough this afternoon?’
‘I bought her coffees all week, and those doughnuts she likes. Is it unreasonable to think that if a person drinks the coffee and eats the food you buy them that you’re on the way to being friends?’
‘This is not unreasonable,’ I tell him.
‘So this afternoon I asked her if she wanted to maybe meet up somewhere and she said she might be at Pavement.’
It’d be one thing for George to have said she might be at Laundry and then not turn up. But to tell Martin to come here to wait for her is a shitty move.
I check my watch and see it’s only a little after seven. ‘Come to Laundry. I’ll buy you a beer while we wait for Rachel.’
He looks deflated after the news of George, so says he’ll just get a taxi and go home. I’m not leaving him alone around here, though, so I sling my arm around him and walk him to the door.
We leave Pavement and head towards Laundry. ‘How long do I have to pay?’ Martin asks. ‘I mean how hard does a guy have to work to be friends with your sister?’
I’m starting to wonder this myself. I know George has had some trouble at school that’s not her fault, but she’s throwing away the chance of having a friend by her side for her final year. I’d love to explain George to Martin but I can’t because I don’t understand her myself.
As I think this, I see Amy ahead. She’s leaning against a building, not far from the bookshop. My heart still goes crazy when I see her. All she has to do is turn up and I’m right back where I started.
‘I’m waiting for Greg,’ she tells me.
I think back to her text, and the first thing I want to ask her is, ‘What does at the moment mean?’ Because ‘at the moment’ sounds hopeful. But before I have time to ask, Greg arrives. He pulls up in a car, gets out, and stands between us.
‘Stop hassling Amy,’ he says.
I step to the side so I can see Amy, and ask my question. ‘What does “at the moment” mean exactly?’
‘Did you hear me?’ Greg asks, but I ignore him.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask Amy. ‘Are things okay?’
‘I think you should go,’ she says. ‘We can talk later.’
‘We’re talking now,’ I say.
‘Did you hear me?’ Greg says again, this time loudly in my ear.
‘Not very well. Because my ears are not tuned to the language of dickhead,’ I say, turning around to see four guys, all of whom I know from school, each one of them, a dickhead.
‘Maybe your ears should be tuned to the language of dickhead,’ Greg says, and Amy and I laugh,
which makes him even angrier than he was a second ago.
He tells his friends to get us, and there isn’t much time to get away. There’s just enough to lunge at the guy who’s taken hold of Martin. ‘Run!’ I yell after the guy let’s go, but Martin stays where he is. It’s a brave move. Stupid, sure. But brave.
They haul him towards the car first, throwing him in the back and slamming the door. They grab me second, and shove me in the boot. Before they close it over, the last thing I see is Amy standing on the footpath, staring in my direction.
The car starts and I feel the rhythm of the road. It’s an understatement to say that the night is not turning out how I’d imagined. I wish I were the kind of guy who didn’t panic but I am not that guy. As it turns out, I’m the guy who panics quite a bit. They won’t kill us but they’ll do something bad, and at this point I think it’s best not to imagine what that bad might be.
All the while I’m lying here, I’m trying to work out what Amy sees in this guy. I’m trying to interpret her expression before they closed me in the boot. Anger at Greg? Fear? Pity for me?
Surely she can’t be even a little bit in love with Greg now. What is there to be a little bit in love with? Part of me is happy he’s done this because there’s no way she’ll be able to stay with him after tonight. Love’s insane but it’s not fucking insane.
I try to work out which way we might be going based on the speed of the car. First they move slowly, I’m guessing because High Street’s full of traffic on Friday night. The car picks up to about sixty for a while, so I think they might be going down Melton Street, which means they’re taking us through the city. Slow, fast, slow. I map it out but I’ve got no real idea. My instinct is they’re taking us across the other side to the harbour.
It’s about fifteen minutes before they stop. One of them opens the boot but Martin’s putting up a good fight in the back seat, so he pushes it back down to help his friends contain him. I stop the boot clicking shut at the last minute. I’m free but I can’t run. I’m not leaving Martin and anyway, there’s nowhere to run. I was right. We’re at the stretch of road that runs along the docks.
